Here are some ideas for campaigns you might want to run with 99Designs:

1) Affiliate marketing launch. Say you just wrote a new e-Book, created a sales page, maybe a video series… maybe you put the product on Clickbank or another affiliate network, have affiliates in mind you want to target and sell the product for you… great! But you’re missing one thing. Advertisement banners. With 99Designs you can get banners in many sizes, say you want one that’s 150×150, 468×60, and otherwise. Look no further, because a campaign would be a perfect solution for this sort of project. You can have the designers make it flashy or subtle, have a “click here” button or specific colors, writing, whatever you want, they’ll do it for you.

2) Small business idea. You want to launch a new website because you just thought of a great idea. Unfortunately all the themes you’ve found online have been used a million times and you want something fresh, something original. You’ve got it. Show 99Designs designers exactly how you want the site to look, how you want it to feel, and they’ll build it for you. Whether you want it in HTML, on WordPress, or in another computer-language, with experts in every sort of coding language, there will certainly be people to get the job done for you.

3) Self-rebranding. Maybe you just landed a new job or plan to in the near future and you want business cards that will blow the person away once handing it to them. Something highly original, memorable, and personally branded to you. Guess what? They’ve got you covered, again. Maybe you want a graphic on it, special coloring or a new brand for an existing company which you want to start promoting locally. The possibilities are limitless.

4) Personal blog. There’s nothing better than having a blog you can write in regularly all about yourself, then get a following and obtain an online presence. There’s no better way to do this then to differentiate yourself from all there other blogs out there, and trust me, there’s a lot of them. To do this, have a web design (or WordPress design) done for you to suit your tastes. Spice it up some. Have it look different than anyone elses and for people to not want to leave once entering your site just because it puts them in awe.

As you can see there are tons of ways to take advantage of 99Designs and their excellent services. They have two strong points that they stand on which make them thrive as a company and have a huge base of happy customers. First, you don’t just get one design but instead lots — and you’ll find the more you offer to pay for the project, the more submissions you get. More submissions means more chances you’re going to see one and go, “WOW!”. Second, you’re not bound to any contract. If you don’t like any of what you receive and don’t want to use it, you receive your money back in full.

So, what are you waiting for? Check out 99Designs today!

• You spent hours and hours creating a digital product, whether it be an e-Book, video series, or otherwise, and you know it’s great.
• You know it has the potential to sell and help a large number of end-customers.
• You’ve created an excellent landing page (the page in which potential purchasers see), your copy (text which you’ve written to explain what the product is and why they should buy it) is well-written, and “the price is right” – as in it’s not too low to seem unworthy of sales, but not too high to make people think, “Why would I spend that much?!”.

The problem remains – how to get people to purchase it. How to get people to know what you know (that if they buy it, they’ll become greatly benefitted).

Consider these steps to creating a digital product that allows you to wake up in the morning and see invoice after invoice of purchases. That’s called passive income, and I’m willing to bet you wouldn’t mind it.

1)      Don’t merely focus on free ways to drive traffic to your landing page – you’ll be missing out a huge number of potential customers. Consider Google Adwords. This is a paid form of driving traffic to your landing page which can cost only 5 cents in many cases (depending on how popular the phrase is that you want your advertisement to rank for). If for every 100 visits you receive 2 sales and you spend 5 cents per visit, that’s a total of $5. If your product sells for, say, $27, you made over $50 for spending $5. Scale this and you’re bringing in some big money.

2)      If you have an organic visitor, someone genuinely interested in your product but possibly not wanting to make a purchase right then and there, don’t lose them. Have an option for them to sign up for an email newsletter. Make them aware that signing up for the newsletter means they’ll receive exclusive monthly content, a free e-Book, or a special discount offer (something enticing… otherwise they won’t subscribe!). You can then in the future put in a plug for your product and why they should buy it. Offer a special discount or an extra “oomph” to push them over the hurdle of maybe buying the product to definitely buying the product.

3)      Join a network such as Clickbank. This is one that I personally use. If your digital product is accepted by their staff you open up the ability for thousands and thousands of people looking to promote affiliate offers to stumble upon yours. You can write a description of what your product is about, offer banner advertisements to help affiliates promote your product, and in return you’ll offer them a percentage commission of every sale they make. Think of it this way – imagine having 1,000 other people promoting your product. Even if you only make 50% of every sale instead of 100%, those sales that are derived from affiliates would not have been realized otherwise. Clickbank makes itespecially easy because they do all the payment processing, all the affiliate commission splitting and even process refunds. Everything is super easy and integrates beautifully with third-party websites such as e-Junkie (instant delivery for digital products via email so you don’t have to send an email manually every time a sale is made), email marketing solutions (i.e. AWeber, iContact, etc), and so on.

4)      Don’t be all talk. If you are selling something and want people to take you seriously, unless you already are standing on a large reputation, you have to earn it. Give something for free on your page (this is a perfect way to capture emails for future sales, by the way). Maybe write a several page e-Book to give away, or maybe special access to a video series. Leave a cliffhanger at the end so if they want to learn more and really derive large benefits they’ll have to purchase your paid product. You can say you know what you’re talking about all you want on your sales page, have all the testimonials you want, but until you prove yourself to a potential customer by actually showing them, or rather teaching them something they didn’t previously know, it’ll be very hard to create high conversions and a successfully selling product.

5)      There’s no better way to drive sales than through ranking highly for keywords related to your product. Think of keywords that people would search for and want to end up on a page like yours. Create an SEO (search engine optimization) campaign around these keywords. This is done by building backlinks to your site from other high-authority sites. For example, say your product is in the weight loss niche. You want your site to come up when people search “best weight loss plan guide”. To rank for this keyword, you need sites to write about you and have a hyperlink with those words directing to your site. This gives you the SEO juice needed to begin advancing up the Google ladder onto page one.

6)      Address questions you would have if you put yourself in a buyer’s shoes. Don’t leave any questions unanswered such as what the refund policy is, what is included with the purchase, when the order will be fulfilled (i.e. when the customer will receive their product via email), and what differentiates your product from competitors. While it’s easy for someone to send you an email to have the questions answered, a lot of people simply won’t do it. Instead they’ll leave the page and never come back (say bye-bye, potential customer!).

7)      A sales page with only text is extremely boring and has very low conversions. Add color, a video, graphics, etc. – see what works for your product because it’s not a “one size fits all” sort of thing. You might have heard that “a picture is worth a million words”. Being that an average online-user stays on a website for an average of 7 seconds before deciding to leave, your time is limited and you have to provide reason for visitors to stay. Take advantage of what’s “above the fold” – this is what shows when you land on your website without having to scroll down. After all, customers may never end up scrolling down if what’s above the fold is not enticing enough. Have a video showing with quality audio, a graph or image that really explains your product well, and make sure the copy is perfect (draws the reader in, absolutely no spelling errors, etc). Maybe you’ll end up with a little bit of everything. AB testing is great for this too. Try one style for a week, another style for another week, and compare the results. See how long visitors are staying on the page and maybe the number of sales per visitors will change slightly (or drastically) too.

8 ) Write new content regularly and let readers know you’re here to stay. If someone signs up for a newsletter they genuinely want to hear from you (hopefully not too frequently). They care when you write new content or publish new information because they trust your opinion or consider you a guru in a specific niche. At least write once a week or twice if you can, and be active. Respond to people’s comments and emails. If you write a new post only every month people are going to be less inclined to attempt and keep up with your site unless when you do post it’s really THAT good. An example of this would be ViperChill (he writes infrequently, but when he does, it’s great — and look at his following!).

Absolutely not. If it was that easy, we’d all be rich living on a yacht somewhere warm. Finding success with email marketing is extremely complicated and there isn’t a list you can follow to guarantee to provide assurance that you’ll make a 5 or 6 or even 7 digit income, but there certainly are some guidelines that I can help you out with. These guidelines if you decide not to follow you will find it nearly impossible (or indeed impossible) to succeed, but if deciding to follow them, your chances will be much greater. I would love to hear what has worked and hasn’t worked for you in the comments area!

1) If you don’t want to read the email, neither will they. After drafting up an email for your email marketing campaign, actually read it. Think if the reader would derive any knowledge from the email and benefit in some way. If they won’t, don’t consider sending it. Every single email you send to your list must involve excellent content that makes readers look forward to future emails. If you don’t have anything important to send, don’t send anything at all as to reduce the risk of unsubscribers and unhappy readers.

2) Know who your target market is. The people in your list probably have many interests… but they only joined your list for one of them. If your site is in the weight loss niche, don’t send them content and offers for anything else. Don’t guess and hope that they might be interested in it. Whatever the content is about where users opted-in at is what you need to get focused on. If they weren’t interested in what was on that page they wouldn’t have opted-in in the first place.

3) 75% content, 25% offers. The goal for the majority of people when it comes to email marketing is to make an income out of it. If you constantly send offers to your list they’re going to be much less likely to purchase anything through you via your recommendation. A good rule is to provide around 3 emails of excellent content for every 1 1 email that you are promoting an offer in. Your list is valueless if no one ever opens the emails you send so be sure to not burn your list out or all your work will be a loss.

4) Learn about the products you’re promoting, purchase and use them if necessary. If you promote a product, someone purchases it, and the product ends up being terrible, never expect them to buy something again. If you need to purchase it or test it to make sure it’s something worthwhile for people to use let alone pay money for, so be it. This especially goes for when your list grows larger and you have the potential to make thousands of dollars per email. Big paychecks like that for just having to give an e-Book, software, or website a “test-run” or “test-read” is certainly worth it (and I’m sure you agree).

5) Always edit and re-edit before sending. Don’t send emails with misspelled words and improper grammar. It’s just sloppy and unpleasant to read. Read through it a couple times before making it final. Most important of all, don’t mess up the spelling in the title of the email! If this isn’t something you’re strong at you can always have other people look it over or outsource the work. Websites such as Elance.com (an outsourcing network) have people that are willing to do great work for inexpensive prices.

You might wonder why making a successful blog is so difficult. Imagine if there were 100 grocery stores within a square mile. That’s a ton of competition, and kind of like it is for the blogging community. With so many bloggers and aspiring writers out there, standing out from the crowd is extremely difficult… but not impossible. Not being proactive I’ll tell you right now will not get you the following you want. Being passive with the millions of people trying so hard will get you nowhere, I promise, I’ve been there. Take a look at these options and think what might help you. Pick a path you want to go down, a niche, be persistent, always provide the best content you’re capable of, and don’t give up. Nothing online happens overnight, especially success.

SEOMoz
Do you want to track the performance of your blog? I’m not just talking hits, bounce rate… Google Analytics can do all of that. I’m talking about where your blog currently ranks on Google and how to improve it. I’m talking about analyzing where your SEO and keyword rank currently stands and how to improve it. Between SEOMoz’s on-page recommendations, weekly crawls to notify you of changes (whether they be good or bad), exclusive videos and access to new tools currently being developed and so much more, this is one thing you can’t miss out on. Plus, take advantage of their free, no obligation 30-day trial!

CoffeeCup
Coffeecup is awesome. They have tons of free stuff to download, and what’s not free is cheaply priced. Everything from web graphics to buttons to fonts to entire layouts, e-commerce shopping carts, and so much more. In reality I don’t think there’s anything CoffeeCup doesn’t have. Plus they have one of coolest, most colorful looking websites ever.  

Doba
Doba at its heart is a drop-ship company. What’s a drop ship company? You promote products (which Doba has over a million of), and once they’re sold, you do nothing and make profit. How’s that work? Doba provides you with products, not physically but the ability to sell them, you promote them, and once someone goes through your checkout and makes a purchase, Doba sends it to them. For example, if Doba’s sale price to the end-user is $40 and Doba provides you it at a price of $20, you get $20. All you do is create the sale; you’re not on the shipping or customer support side whatsoever. Some of the products you can offer include brands such as Nikon, DeWalt, Seiko, Adidas, Hanes, and Panasonic — the list goes on and on though.  

oDesk
oDesk is the best place to have outsourced service done. Sometimes you don’t have enough time to do it all. Or maybe, on the contrary, you’re someone with too much time and a valuable skill that people are willing to pay for. oDesk is the place to be. You can hire (cheaply) people to do things such as write code for you, design websites, write content, just about anything online-related. You can also offer your service and work at an hourly rate. Some huge talent is on oDesk that you should definitely check out and take advantage of.  

Alexa
Alexa is hugely popular. They’ve been around for a long time, have an amazing reputation, and are well known in the blogging community. Alexa started off as a website that ranked your site compared to others, and was an index alike to Google and other search engines for you to submit to, and your blog’s ranking was said to increase pretty well when being associated once becoming indexed. They also, however, provide services to website-owners that is very important when you’re simply struggling. If your blog isn’t performing as you think it should, there could be something restricting it. Whether search engines aren’t picking it up properly, your key words are not finding your target market, or your content isn’t optimized properly (where SEO, or search engine optimization, comes in to play), Alexa will tell you. Not only will the reports given tell you, but it’ll give you every single detail on how to fix it, make it better, and take you step-by-step until you reach the top.  

SproutSocial
If you have a product or service to sell and you know it’s valuable, or if you can even think of one that you would want to offer, the biggest difficult would inevitably be finding customers. After all, you can have the best deal in the world for people but if the world is unaware of your existence, you don’t stand a chance. SproutSocial brings customers to you, helps your social media efforts, saves you time, effort, and even manages your contacts. The list doesn’t end there… so much more is able to be done with this software. My advice is to check it out and see for yourself!  

HootSuite
HootSuite is “hoot sweet”… okay, sorry for that failure and lack of a pun, but what I’m trying to say is that it’s a pretty sweet social media tool! If you run a blog you probably know it’s annoying checking your blog’s Facebook, Twitter, keeping up to date with posts and responding and so on. HootSuite takes all your social media profiles, jams it in to one “suite” (thus the name), and allows you to to instead of having to go from site to site, manage everything in a single window. It’s a huge time-saver, provides analytics as to improve your social media standings, RSS integration, and more. Offered is a free and paid version with of course the paid version offering some features not seen in the free one.  

Veer
Veer has so much stuff for a blogger. Too much stuff, almost. Fonts and graphics that you won’t find anywhere else. Lots of free stuff too. Free credits for non-free stuff when you first sign up. Pretty much just something you have to check out or else you’d be missing out big time. Become inspired by Veer’s creativity which hopefully will spark your next big idea.

You want traffic to your blog but don’t know where to get it. You might be willing to pay for it, but you only want to pay for it if it brings real results. And who is to define “real results”, anyways? If you don’t mind me imposing, I vote that your best option would be getting traffic for free. If you don’t want free traffic, you have no reason to really be here, because that’s exactly what you’re going to learn in the following text: how to get people on your blog at no cost. The only cost to you is some time, but the methods that I have laid out are all self-explanatory and nothing you will be doing is complex. No HTML knowledge necessary or anything of the sort, just motivation to increase the traffic of your site.If you have a blog, you may want to increase traffic and make some cash off AdSense or an affiliate program. You may just want to get the word out about your blog to share your knowledge with others. Maybe you run an e-business (or want to run an e-business), but know that with no one on your site, your sales will barely be worth your time. Think of it this way. You have an e-business that sells, say, stuffed animals. If your store is on the first page of Google when people type in, “buy stuffed animals”, you’re going to get a lot of sales. If your site is on the 8th page and you get several hits a week, how many sales do you really think you’re going to get?

Please feel free to comment on how my suggestions have worked out for you, I would love nothing more than to hear. If you follow the steps below, I guarantee your web traffic will increase. As it’s free, it sure doesn’t cost much to find out for yourself.

1. Submit your blog to DMOZ.com, Google.com, Yahoo.com, and Bing.com. Then, submit your site to Allsitecafe.com/submitter/submit.html. This will submit your your URL automatically to the big players (i.e. Google, Yahoo, etc), then the search engine/web directory submitter will increase your online visibility to other, smaller search engines. Other search engine/web directory submission (such as the one I referenced) websites work as well, this is just the one I’ve always used and has provided me with results.

2. Create an account on Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, and Digg. Create well-detailed information about why your presence online should be known, your mission, and who you are. Include a picture that people know you by, even if it’s a simple logo. These are all social networking sites which people can become interested in your site’s missions and goals. When people are interested in what your blog is all about, they’ll be rather inclined to check it out themselves.

3. Join sites like Traffup.net and TrafficSwarm.com. There are tons of sites out there that you can earn points for by looking at other people’s sites, watching quick videos, viewing advertisements, etc, and in return your points can be used to drive traffic to your site. While this traffic may not be the most targeted, if you have an excellent homepage that entices people’s interests, some traffic may convert into regular visitors.

4. Make a YouTube channel. Upload a video (or several) that gives people a non-textual explanation of who you are – some people are visual and would prefer to watch something more interactive. This does not mean you need to create a video of yourself, you can use simple free computer-recorders such as CamStudio (downloadable online) to capture your voice and your screen (i.e. as seen in online tutorials on how to use programs).

5. Sign up for Google AdWords and Microsoft AdCenter. You can find $75 free credits online for Google AdWords. With an average of around .20 cents a click (or less, unless your site is specifically about a very popular niche, then it’s more expensive), you can get a good amount of traffic for no cost (for the first $75, that is, and after that point, if the cost-per-click is in your favor, you can go from there!). If you purchase a book by Kevin Lee, “Pay-Per-Click Search Advertising”, which costs about $12 online, you are given $200 credit for Microsoft AdCenter. Both pay-per-click sites are simple to use and draw traffic to your site more heavily depending on the bid you specify for particular keywords. For example, if you offer to pay 20 cents for the keyword “looking to buy e-book on cooking”, then when people search that on Google or Yahoo, the ad is seen and you only pay if someone clicks it. eBay and Amazon also offer similar services and include free credits if you do a simple search for them online.

6. Add H1, H2, and H3 tags to your site. H1 tags specify the most important parts about your content, such as 3 key phrases of what your site is specifically based on. H2 are the secondary phrases that should be noted, and H3, the third most important. Tags are simple to use and look like this < H 1 > Keyword here < / H 1 >… only without the spaces. They work great with search engines as to signify what points you want to be highlighted on your site.

7. Create a Favicon. A favicon is the tiny picture next to the URL bar that makes your site look pretty and more memorable. Plus, when bookmarked, it’s easier to find. It takes only minutes to make one and you can use any picture you so desire (though it will be very small, so I would suggest something that isn’t highly-detailed). First you need to convert an image in to an .ico file (I use this site to do that: Iconverticons.com), and then if you use WordPress just download a “favicon plugin”; if you another web-editor such as Dreamweaver, GoDaddy, etc, just search for a tutorial online, there are plenty.

8. Write press releases. I would suggest writing two at first, and make sure they’re very well-written and targeted towards the crowd you want it hit. My favorite sites to use for the best results are Free-Press-Releases.com and PRLog.com. Press releases explain what you’re all about, some savvy information as to draw people in to the article, and wrapping it up with a link to your site to learn more.

9. Create an RSS feed at Feedburner.google.com. People can subscribe to your RSS feed and then they are informed when something such as a new article or blog is posted on your site. Don’t forget to submit your RSS feed to RSS directories!

10. Offer a newsletter. They work like RSS feeds too (if you’d prefer both, why not!) Adding a newsletter to your site is simple and people only need to submit their email to you to be added to it. Their email is forwarded to you to store (in to an email you signify as where you want to receive the newsletter subscriber’s email addresses), or you can use Mailchimp.com and it will store the information for you. They also have a great system to create the newsletter sign-up box, etc. When you want to inform your subscribers of something new, you have the capability to do so by sending one quick email.

11. Write knowledgeably and do it frequently. With it almost not needing to be said but at the same time is of utmost importance so I’ll say it, write well. Write knowledgeably and write interesting, new content. Don’t copy other peoples or you won’t get anywhere. Take what you know, write about it, and the target audience will come.

12. Sign up for Google.com/webmasters/tools and XML-sitemaps.com. You can create a sitemap on XML-sitemaps very easily (it does it for you), and then you can submit it to Google’s webmaster tools for it to be picked up more easily by Google. Other large search engines (Yahoo, etc) have alike tools to take advantage of.

13. Link to other people; more importantly, have them link to you. It’s important to have people linking your site to theirs as to increase your visibility If you know friends with websites on similar topics as yours or are willing to reach out to others online, you’d be surprised that people may actually be willing to help you out. The more links online going to your site means more people have the potential of checking out your content.

14. Answer people’s questions relating to your blog’s subject matter. Places you can do this in are namely Yahoo Answers and Ask.com. Some common questions that people ask online become very high on search engine results and when you answer them as well as provide a link to your site as a reference, the results can be very beneficial. Why? If someone has a question on your subject matter and you answer the question thoroughly, you are seen as more of an expert in your field.

15. Sign up for forums on your subject matter. Create a signature (which goes under your posts) and on popular, informative posts, chime in. Provide your knowledge. People will instantly see your signature which has a reference to your URL. As when answering questions online, if your posts are intelligent and relevant, you are seen as more of an expert in regards to the subject you’re writing about.

16. Add Google.com/analytics to your site. This in itself will not increase your traffic, but you will be able to see your hits go up and what works and what doesn’t. If your traffic is going down, you know what you’re doing isn’t working. The same goes for the opposite situation, if your traffic is increasing, then you know you’re on the right path.

17. Reach out to your own network. Whether it be friends, family, or anyone else in your social network, reach out. They are bound to have accounts on sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, etc, and if you ask them to put a quick blurb about your site, a chain effect can occur (they tell their friends, their friends tell their friends, and the reaction continues to grow).

18. Keep your site clean and simple. Not that you need a white background and a small amount of text, but stray away from putting things on your site that will increase the time to load your page (several embedded videos, lots of images/java/flash). Your page will be ranked lower if it takes people a long time to load your page. This is not to say pictures are bad because they aren’t – in fact they’re good and draw people further in to what you’re writing about (such as pictures in a book).

19. Make sure you have no broken links. If you have multiple pages on your site, double and triple check that every link is working. Broken links will hurt you. Link all pages to one another so people can navigate themselves through your site with ease.

20. Check how your web page looks on different browsers. Specifically check Safari, Windows Explorer, and FireFox. These are all widely used and if your site looks horrible on a specific browser, all of the people tuning in from that browser will instantly leave upon arrival.

21. Have your domain name be relevant. The first thing people see is your domain. If your site is about making pizzas and your domain name is How-to-make-sandwiches.com, you may want to consider starting from the ground up.

22. Create an email account that people can contact you at. Owning a blog means you are bound to get emails. If it’s an e-business, you will get questions regarding sales, support, etc. If you are blogging about a topic, people wanting to know more about the topic will send you a message. If you have several email addresses all over the place they will be unsure as to how to contact you.

23. Make a mobile-page. The world is becoming more and more tech-savvy, and with so many people using their phones to go online nowadays, you can customize your site in a simple manner so that when people view your page(s) from a phone, they’re much more readable and accessable. Simple tutorials on the several-step process are found throughout Google & YouTube. Keep in mind, changing how your site looks for mobile viewers does not change how it looks for people on regular web-browsers.

24. Offer something for free. You want free traffic, why? Because it’s free, and as humans, we love freebies! If you’re selling something on your site, for example an e-book, offer part, or a full one for free. If you’re not selling something on your site but rather providing people information, offer a free PDF download for your latest articles or insider-information in to your expertise at no cost. While it may seem counter intuitive offering something free on a site you’re looking to make money on, you have to think long-term and realize the benefits of the increased traffic.

25. Guest post on other people’s blogs. While you may think writing only on your blog is beneficial, guest posting on other people’s blogs that are alike to yours is very beneficial. It gives you some “SEO juice” improving your search engine ranking, plus when people visit these other blogs and read the post, if they appreciate the content they may end up jumping over to your blog and checking it out as well.

26. Write reviews on Amazon. Read anything related to your blog’s content? For example, say your blog is about weight loss. Read any good books about weight loss? Write a review and make your username the URL to your blog, or add something like this to the end of your review: Matt G., YourSite.com. When people are looking for information on weight loss, then, if they look for books on the topic and see you wrote a knowledgeable review about the book and see your blog, viola! Free traffic!

27. Comment on people’s blogs pertaining to your subject matter with a link back to your site or post. Remember, don’t sound “spammy” or it won’t get accepted by the author. Include valuable information and only include the link to your site if it will genuinely provide the reader further-related content.

28. Create link bait which is unique content that is created to draw attention such as Facebook “likes” and Twitter “tweets”. Link bait isn’t easy to create, in fact it’s very difficult but when it’s successful you will receive an extraordinary amount of traffic from it. Think outside of the box. Create something no one ever has before, perfect it then launch it to the world.

29. Reach out to fellow bloggers that discuss topics in the same niche as yours. They may never respond, but some may enjoy friendly emails and mutual promotion of each other’s content as in form some sort of partnership. Creating these bonds, especially with blogs that are higher page rank and have an already-built community can reach jump-start your own following.

30. Write an e-Book and provide it to visitors for free for “liking” or “tweeting” your site. Think about the chain-reaction that it can cause. I use a tool called CloudFlood to do this, and another is PayWithATweet (both are free). Visitors are allowed to download a file instantly, like an e-Book, instantly after the “like” or “tweet” sends. Pretty sweet, huh? While you receive no monetary revenue from a single download, the individual puts your URL in front of hundreds (and potentially thousands) of other people. Imagine how many people will see the link to your website if 100 people download your e-Book — or 1,000!

Alas, what is a blog if it isn’t successful? Further, “successful” may be very different to two people. In regards to what I claim “successful”, I mean the blog has consistent followers (while not necessarily thousands and thousands of them), and has enough search engine optimization that the site ranks well for specific keywords on your topic(s). It’s not the easiest task to be #1 on Google, but even ranking on the first page is certainly something to be applauded about. It also means that you will get more traffic because the more online visibility you have, the more people are going to see your site.

So what does it take to have a successful blog? Here are some things that you should definitely consider when either starting a blog or already have one, but want to make it better, more targetted, and well… more successful.

Make your content great, not just good.

More than anything else, excellent and original content will always prevail. Search engines love it and so do people. Write your own work, keep it well-edited, and always make it of the best possible quality. It’ll pay off.

Write about what you’re passionate about and know a lot about.

If you don’t care about your topic, it will show in your writing. Write about what you love or know a lot about. Writing vague information will be seen right through; people want detailed and specific information, not basic information they can find on a million other sites. What I mean is, be in-depth. Allow people to read your blog posts and learn a lot from them, that’s why they’re reading them in the first place. The more they learn from a blog post, the higher chance they’ll come back and want to learn more.

Include pictures — people love pictures.

Pictures add a story to your blog. They add something visual and will make people stay on your page longer. Too many pictures are bad and will make your blog take a long time to load, but one or several smaller pictures pose no problem. At the same time, the pictures should be directly related to your topic — a picture unrelated to the topic(s) of your blog will leave people confused and thinking you’re a little confused yourself.

Write often and keep your page(s) updated.

If you write a blog post and wait a month, that post may be on the first page of Google but after days then weeks of nothing new being posted, your ranking will continually decrease. You need to add new content and if your old work isn’t as tight as it could be, make it stronger, give it a nice edit. Don’t blog to blog, though, don’t just write new content because you feel it’s necessary. Write when you have something to say.

Put a story behind yourself.

If people are going to read your content as it becomes posted they want to know who you are. You don’t need to provide a picture, but just what you’re all about. Why you’re writing, how you might be considered an expert in the field, and whatever else you’d like people to know about you.

Offer a means to contact you.

Whenever you write about a topic, people will have questions. If they are on your page because they’re interested in the topic, they probably want to learn more. Maybe they’ll want to contact you by email if they’re confused. If you truly enjoy writing about what your blog’s topic is, you won’t mind sending a sentence back to people randomly as they message you. Your readers simply knowing you’re a real person might just convince more people to read your blog than you think.

Include ways to follow you (Facebook, Twitter, RSS).

If your purpose is to get more people interested in your site and more people reading each blog post you make, let the posts be known as soon as they go live. If people are able to be updated regarding something new on your site via Facebook, Twitter, or an RSS feed, the people that regularly read your content will become more of a community and feel a further sense of attachment to your work if being informed when something new is available.

Make your page clean, simple, and understandable.

Confusing, strangely colored websites are hard on your eyes and sometimes reason enough to leave the site. Keep your site simple; while it can still be colorful and complex, let the navigation itself and content of your posts be easily read. I would recommend showing someone else your site and see what they think, kind of like a proof-read. If they aren’t confused, great. You yourself will be bias about your page because since you made it, you will know how to navigate it properly.

Optimize your online presence.

Through SEO (search engine optimization), headers (H1, H2, H3), plugins if you’re using WordPress, a sitemap, submitting to directories and search engines, all are great ways to optimize the presence of your website on the internet. Plus, it’s important if you ever want to rank well and become a popular blog. Go do it! It’s super important and putting an hour or even a couple of hours towards it can make a world of difference. Google some keywords that you believe pertain to your blog. See how well you’re doing with content alone. And remember, when you start optimizing your site, results can take around a week to be seen. Sometimes it’ll happen in a couple hours or day, or sometimes it’ll even take a little longer than a week. But they’ll be seen, promise.

Don’t overload with ads.

Too many ads looks bad and unprofessional. If you want to monetize your site that’s great, but placing too many ads where your viewers are expecting to read content is a real turn off. I recommend taking advantage of the top and bottom of your page as well as side-columns, but then again I don’t recommend taking advantage of them all. Maybe use the method as I explained before — ask a friend, family member, etc, to look at your page and ask them, “are there too many ads?”. Remember, the most important thing on your site is traffic. With traffic, all else will fall in to place.

Keep your topic at least a little broad.

If you want to write about something specific, don’t let me tell you not to. But if the broad category of what you’re writing about is too specific to begin with, you might want to reconsider. Let me give an example. Say your blog is about ways to make your house “green” and eco-friendly. Well, “going green” is a broad topic so you can narrow down. Maybe how to make your house eco-friendly and green would be a good blog topic. Or, narrow it down a little more. How to make the garden of your house, waste consumption, or energy use in your house more “green”. However, if your blog is going to be about something so narrowed down such as how to listen to music in your home in the most “green” way possible, it’s going to be hard to buid a strong following. That might be a good blog post inside of a “going green” blog, but certainly not the focal point of your blog in general. Remember, you want to hit as large of a crowd as possible, while still maintaining focus on what your blog is truly about. If you stray away from your blog’s initiative, you will find less traffic. People will be coming to your site for a specific topic and if it ends up being about everything and everything, they will be turned off.

Here are some ideas to get your brain thinking about what blog niche you want to write about…

1. News in sports – People love sports and love being updated with what’s new. Focus on a single sport or at least not every sport or plan to have lots of work ahead of you.
2. Celebrity news – Celebrity gossip is huge, just look at how many magazines are dedicated to it! Write about your thoughts on the topics, but only if you’re knowledgeable about the individuals and can write content people want to read!
3. Making money online – This is a huge niche and lots of people write about it. Find an alternative route and find yourself getting a lot of traffic. After all, people are always going to be looking for different ways to earn income when being out of a job and boost the income they have if their current job isn’t paying enough.
4. Tips on complicated software – Some software takes many months to fully understand all the functions. If you’re one of those people that know a lot about a particular program, write how-to’s and step-by-step guides on performing some of the most difficult functions. Videos work, too!
5. Weight loss and/or weight loss diet reviews – If you’ve tried several weight loss plans and had mixed experiences, explain what happened with each. People want to know so they don’t end up paying for a weight loss plan that has no or even negative results.
6. Movie reviews – Are you a movie buff? See movies very frequently? Write about them. Be the “go to person” for when people are thinking, “is this movie worth seeing?”.
7. Political opinions – For you political folks out there, got huge opinions and able to explain them in a fresh fashion? Maybe write about politics for people that don’t know too much about it. After all, it can all become confusing when you aren’t exposed to it frequently!
8. Video game reviews – With video games costing $50 and sometimes $60 each, you don’t want to get caught buying a bad game and wasting your money. There are many large video game review sites out there but put a spin on your reviews, offer additional information that those big sites don’t delve into.
9. Alternative energy – A huge topic becoming more and more popular as companies are going green and discussing global warming. Get in on the discussions.
10. 10. Telecommunications news – As green is becoming big, so is wireless. Particularly cell phones. Want to talk about the devices? Carriers? Comparisons between them? Functions such as wi-fi, 3 & 4G, and so on? Find your angle!
11. 11. Recipes – Mmm, who doesn’t love brand new recipes… as long as they taste good! Write yours in a blog-format with a picture of the final dish! People will love you for it.
12. 12. Higher-education upfall and downfalls – As a college student myself, I know that many people contemplate the benefits of going to school, spending all the time and money. Is this something you can attest to because you’ve been in the same shoes? Reading expert opinions on the matter draw a lot of attention.
13. Internet marketing – Online-based and affiliate marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), blogging, they’re all huge topics. My site BlogOomph is all about it! Have the same interest? Join the party, there’s plenty of the pie for everyone (just don’t copy people’s content, and only write if you indeed are experienced in the field!).
14. Restaurant openings – If you live in a metropolitan area and check out new restaurants, let people know what you think. Restaurant-goers are always looking for new places to check out but want to hear some good work-of-mouth beforehand.
15. Good, original jokes – For you funny people that are always making up jokes people love, jot them down. Share them. If they truly are good and original you’ll receive quite a following.
16. How-to guides on [your topic here] – Expert gardener, knitter, juggler, or something equally as somewhat random? Write a list from A to Z on how to start, the best products to use, tips, tricks, and whatever else you may think of.
17. Big-business acquisitions and sales – Companies are always buying their competitors out for interesting reasons. Have insight on the big acquisitions? Share your information and thoughts!
18. Vacation spots – With so many places to visit you certainly can’t visit them all. Write about not only where you advise to go, but why, share pictures and stories and exciting details!
19. Discounts/deals/promo codes – Now you certainly can’t find all the discount codes for every site on the web, that would take an eternity (literally). Focus on a site you use a lot that has tons of customers and has regular discounts, sales, and so on. Become the bookmarked site that people go to before checking out online.
20. Questions answered on the topic of love – To love or not to love, and how to love, and who to love, those are only some of the questions! A matchmaker? Have a passion for love and helping people find it? Don’t look any further.
21. Dating websites – So many dating sites online to choose from, which is right for you? Used numerous and had good or bad results? Share them! Help people find the right site for them and if they find the match of their dreams, they’ll never stop thanking you.
22. Fashion – Some fashion blogs out there get tons and tons of traffic. It’s not easy to keep in-the-know with all the top designers out there but if you’re someone that has a “nack” for it, start writing!
23. Original artwork/graphic design – Post a new image you’ve developed or designed every couple days (or on a weekly basis). Explain why it deserves recognition. Explain your perception of its beauty. Allow people to share it on their own website. Ask for feedback.
24. How to succeed in school – Some kids get A’s without effort and others struggle to barely pull off a C. If you’ve always done well without trying lend assistance and help others with tips on what you did to succeed. Maybe make a list of 10 things that kept you motivated in school or helped you always get your work done on time.
25. Finding jobs during times of recession – During any recession there are still plenty of jobs out there, they’re just much harder to be found. Help people out that are having no luck at all. Point them in the right direction if you have information that they don’t.
26. Windows vs. Mac – The never-ending battle of which is better. Certainly there is no “right” answer but there’s certainly tons to be said about the two companies. Compare alike computers, their histories, future expectations, and more.
27. Inspirational/funny/famous quotes & explanations – A quote a day keeps the doctor away! Well, not really, but regularly posted, uncommon quotes are hard to come by and definitely “bookmarkable” material.
28. Best blogging templates & tools – Have favorites? Why are they your favorite? Are they free? What benefits did you drive from them? Explain it all!
29. Fast food restaurants – They’re delicious but many popular books and movies have been made bashing them. Clearly a controversial topic. Take a side and bring all the companies into the talk — McDonalds, Burger King, Wendys, Taco Bell, and more!
30. Overcoming habits – Indeed very difficult and sometimes seemingly impossible. Have you overcome one, such as smoking, that you never thought you’d be able to do? Help others help themselves. Provide insight to how you found the means to quit and it may end up helping them too.